Why not drive away more companies?

Taking a tactic from the envy playbook , Democrats in the California Senate want to grab even more from successful businesses. Which would drive away even more companies. The Register reported:

A bill sponsored by Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, and Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, would set a sliding scale for corporate taxes, cutting them for publicly traded companies whose CEOs earn less than 100 times the median compensation of their workers, and raising them when CEOs make more.

California is the first state to consider tying taxes to CEO pay, according to Damon Silvers, policy director of the AFL-CIO labor federation, which tracks the issue for its Executive Paywatch initiative.

The California bill, SB1372, surprised some observers by passing the Senate Appropriations Committee by a 5-2 vote Friday, with Democrats supporting it and Republicans opposing.

The money, of course, would flow to the government, of which the five state senators are leaders. And which the AFL-CIO helps control through its public-employee members; and through financing political campaigns.

If these politicians really wanted to help the middle class and the poor, for starters they would slash the top 9.3 percent income tax rate that starts at about $55,000 of income. (The Prop. 30 tax increase will expire in five years.) That’s right, in California, you’re considered “rich” at $55K of income — even though the state’s so expensive that’s really lower-middle-class!

Next, they would repeal AB 32, which destroys jobs to fight “global warming” that isn’t happening.

Then they would repeal the California Coastal Commission, a Soviet-style agency that severely limits developing land, which drives home and apartment prices sky-high, so only the 1 percent can live here.

9 comments

None of that will happen of course John because they are all bad ideas. The Coastal Act, for one, was an idea that has proven itself worthy time and again. Unless you want the coast of California to look like Northern Mexico or Las Vegas— you like the act.

Luckily we live in a representative democracy— the Coastal Act was the People’s will!

I love it, to raise taxes on companies with the kind of insanely high gap between chief executive and median worker pay that has become the norm in American business is just a start but needs to go further eventually! We need to end the practice of these PIG CEO “unions” – that is, the corporate compensation committees composed disproportionately of CEOs’ fellow CEOs that have continually raised chief executives’ pay. Just look at the pig Ballmer that has a cool 2billion in cash to buy the clippers! No one moron like this should have that much money when the workers are being starved and raped. I recently read corporate execs who ran America’s great companies made relatively low multiples of what their workers made. In 1965, the ratio was 20 to 1, according to studies by the Economic Policy Institute. By 2012, that ratio had risen to 273 to 1!!!! Time for these greedy pigs to be stopped!!

■The Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program has an approximately 97% success rate. As of late July, 2012, Solyndra, Abound Solar and the handful of other DOE-backed renewable energy companies that went bankrupt represented total investments of less than 3% of the entire DOE portfolio. (Source: U.S. Department of Energy, April 2013, http://1.usa.gov/Nv1OeU) Poor Poodle -Girl, if he says it, it’s wrong ™